In a recent paper, Professors Lucian Bebchuk and Robert Jackson have extended Professor Bebchuk’s extreme and eccentric campaign against director-centric governance into a new realm—that of the Constitution of the United States. They claim that “serious questions” exist about the constitutionality of the poison pill—or, more precisely, “about the validity of the state-law rules that authorize the use of the poison pill.” It is likely, they argue, that these state-law rules violate the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, and are thus preempted, because they frustrate the purposes of the Williams Act, the 1968 federal statute that governs tender-offer timing and disclosure.

Bebchuk and Jackson cite leading academic textbooks and articles that either recognize the preeminence of the poison pill in takeover defense or demonstrate the weakness of preemption challenges to state takeover statutes. The scholars authoring these books and articles, we are told, “overlooked” or “ignored” the obvious fact that poison pills may delay tender offers for lengthy periods of time. Bebchuk and Jackson profess “surpris[e]” that the constitutional issue they discuss “has received little attention, or even notice, from commentators,” and assert that it is rather a shocking “oversight” that, despite a “large literature” on Williams Act preemption, “commentators and practitioners” have devoted “little attention to the question of whether the state-law rules with the most powerful antitakeover effect—the rules authorizing use of the poison pill—are preempted.”

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